Author Archives: Clifford

So Good They Named It Twice

By | |
5 Comments

empire state buildingI’m referring to New York, of course. The Empire State building, which I walked by a short while ago, is still pretty lovely (it has to be said that I’m more of a Chrysler building man, myself – must go and have a look for it).

It’s been several years since those days when I used to use New York as my Summer base camp, and it’s been too long. Four or five years, I think. I’d forgotten how much I missed the city, to be honest. It is certainly good to be back and see it all again, including the bitterly cold wind that can be channeled down the grid streets with the bits of snow side by side underfoot.

The city is even greater in my mind now that you can so easily connect to the airport using the subway, train and the AirTrain. (As I’ve discussed in other posts I am sure the same enhancement (but massively more so) will happen to Los Angeles when the new subway/train lines are built). When I was last […] Click to continue reading this post →

When Physicists Go Bad?

By | | ,
43 Comments

billy cottrellI’m rather shocked by this story, and feel compelled to draw it to your attention. This week’s LA Weekly’s cover story is by Judith Lewis, and it is a very detailed account of what’s been happening to Billy Cottrell since you probably last heard about him. He was convicted for his role in various arson attacks on SUV dealerships in the Pasadena area, and sent to prison. Just to remind you, Billy Cottrell was a graduate student in theoretical physics working with colleagues of mine just up the road at Caltech, and so it has even more resonance as a story than normal, since even though I never knew him, he -or his type- is so familiar to many of us, right down to the youthful fascination with Euler’s eiÏ€ + 1 = 0. (Apparently he left that written at some of the crime scenes…)

torched hummersI leave a question mark in the title of this post for lots of reasons: Just how “bad” was he in the first place? Had some of the vehicles that were damaged not been from out of state, the crimes would not have been Federal matters, and the full weight of the crimes being acts of terrorism (and all that brings with it in today’s atmosphere) would not have transpired. The judge seems also to have simply added three years to his sentence on a whim. His having Asperger’s syndrome was never allowed to be mentioned in the case at all, and so the jury was never given the opportunity to consider that some particular behavioural characteristics (in the course of the crimes themselves, and in the course of the courtroom defense) might have been exacerbated by it. The list of things goes on.

But since his sentencing, things have got even worse. It’s just dreadful. The terrorist […] Click to continue reading this post →

Through a Lens Darkly

By | | , ,
6 Comments

Richard Massey

Well, yesterday’s colloquium by Caltech’s Richard Massey was a lot of fun, and really excellent. When faculty, postdocs and students are all chatting about it afterwards, you know it went well. This is what a departmental colloquium is supposed to do, and it happens when subject, level of delivery and speaker all come together in just the right way.

When the news about that lovely dark matter result broke some months ago, I got in […] Click to continue reading this post →

Grindhouse Marathon

By | | , ,
2 Comments

I just learned of this festival, starting tonight at the New Beverly Cinema. I thought I should tell you about it in case you’re able to go. Also, it’s just fun to remember some of the movies in this genre, or some of the modern movies that celebrate, quote from, or were otherwise influenced by them. The festival should be a lot of fun!

It’s a Quentin Tarantino project, and there’s more at the cinema’s website, and an excellent post about it at the blog “Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule”, which early on has this excellent paragraph:

the mack posterThe director has responded to the New Beverly’s generosity by lining up a gut-bucket cornucopia of authentic grindhouse trash cinema to celebrate not only his supermanchu poster upcoming movie, but the whole experience of seeing sleazy cinema classics in the only movie house left in L.A. (outside of the Vine on Hollywood Boulevard) that feels physically, spatially and, yes, spiritually related to the downtown second-run trash palaces that fed Tarantino’s (and everyone else’s) desire for this kind of rotgut, low-rent fun to begin with.

…and then goes on to do a wonderful thing by finding as many of the original movie posters (or related artwork) for each movie. It’s great to look at, and there’s a rather […] Click to continue reading this post →

When Worlds Collide, I

By | | ,
12 Comments

Angeleno magazine Robert Downey JrA most striking representative of an item from a completely different world than mine is the magazine Angeleno. It is among the most glossy of the glossy magazines I’ve ever seen. I’ve no really strong idea of who its intended readership is – this has been a mystery to me for so long, but by default it clearly can’t be someone like me (an academic), I decided, upon first seeing it. (You can read about the raison d’être of their parent company, Modern Luxury, here.) For some reason it arrives (for free although the cover price is $5.95) in my mailbox every month and I don’t know why. It is almost as though it’s a joke on the part of some prankster deity or other.

It has nevertheless done an excellent job of sneaking past my defenses. I don’t immediately throw it away when I receive it, and I find myself alternately annoyed and fascinated by it. Could this have been part of their plan all along?

It used to be that I was just plain annoyed when it would arrive – as much as 1/2 an inch thick, larger in square footage than most other magazines, highly airbrushed A-list star on the cover, and every page super glossy and shiny – and it would sit there for weeks until I’d find myself glancing inside it … just to confirm that I was justified in my righteous annoyance, you see. Sure enough, it would not disappoint. It has pieces devoted to ways of spending oodles of money on pointless stuff at extraordinary prices. There’s be the hot new treatments (“is Fraxel the new Botox?”). There’d be a gaudy diamond-encrusted PDA for your microscopic toy dog, that you […] Click to continue reading this post →

Show and Tell

By | | , , ,
6 Comments

Well, it is almost the last day of Black History Month and I am behind on answering the traditional emails I receive at this time of year. As I said last year (with a few modifications):

clifford v. johnson at the board Pretty soon after February starts, the deluge of email I get every day gets enhanced a bit by emails from students from all over America. I become part of an assignment, you see. It seems that these students are instructed to find a black scientist and write something about them and do a presentation to their class about them1.

I’m always willing to help with this sort of thing (see the footnote for why), and so I usually send some links: to my personal webpage (here), or one of two profile pages for me at USC here and here (the latter by Katherine Yungmee Kim), a Daily Trojan news story by Diya Chacko here, or the departmental page on me (here), and a list of publications, and I hope that this is all of some use.

As to the standard “what is your date of birth?” question that is usually asked too, I don’t pass out that information over the web, but if you’re an interested student, you can email me for a bit more information if you wish, although I will not give out the exact date.

For a bit of biographical narrative, students can look on the “My Hero Project” […] Click to continue reading this post →

Random Travel Matters

By | | ,
12 Comments

Well, I’m sorry if things have been a bit quiet around here for a bit. I’ve been very busy, and also eight hours out of sync with my usual cycle. Couple this to also being disconnected from the web in the second hotel I was staying in because of me being too cheap to pay the extortionate amount that they were asking for a connection (the other place had a free connection in certain public lounges, and luckily the signal leaked into my room enough to get me a good connection a lot of the time) and you get quite a bit of quiet.

merrion square and st stephen's church

I was in Dublin and London again. Dublin mainly on a work mission, London on the way back for non-work. I was having panel deliberations once again on a range of […] Click to continue reading this post →

New Directions in Real Estate?

By | | , , ,
19 Comments

keats real estate imageOn NPR’s finance programme Marketplace yesterday, there was a somewhat unusual piece. It seems that conceptual artist Jonathan Keats is making some money by selling the extra dimensional rights to various properties in San Francisco! (You can see him at the Modernism Gallery there1).

Since there’s no known way to build on or otherwise occupy this new extra dimensional property (let me explain a bit further in an enormous footnote2), the prices are awfully reasonable. Here’s a transcript of a transaction that I found on their website. Reporter Nathaneal Johnson is observing a sale to punters Oscar Villalon and Mary Ladd:
[…] Click to continue reading this post →